graduate school Archives - Memos and Mirth

Grad schools bearing gifts

March 8, 2015

One day something interesting popped into my inbox.

Among the newsletters and freelance cattle calls was an email from NYU Law School’s Tax LLM program.

It contained a fee voucher.

I was shocked and flattered – tax law was my passion during law school, and NYU’s LLM program is consistently ranked #1 in the country.

A Master of Laws (LLM) degree is a post-law school master’s degree. Tax is one of the few LLM specialties not considered an utter waste of time.

I immediately filled out the LSAC application and strategized how to get recommendation letters from law professors who have long forgotten who I am.

After my initial wave of enthusiasm, I remembered the fraudulent employment stats and starting salaries published by law schools. I also remembered how angry everyone was 2L year when we realized that our school lied to us about our prospects.
After some research into the value of tax LLM programs, I realized that there’s simply not enough reliable information available for me to make an informed decision regarding the purported benefits of an LLM.

What I’m fretting over:

What if I can’t find tax law employment after getting a NYU LLM? Would I just return to Thomson Reuters with $80,000 more in student loans?
What if law firms ignore the LLM degree due to my University of Minnesota degree? An outstanding LLM isn’t going to cut it for a firm looking for an Ivy League Law Review alum.
Even if I get a job at a top Manhattan law firm, would my (supposedly) higher salary overcome the significant opportunity cost of giving up my current corporate career?

Law School

Venti or grande?

November 11, 2009

I’m cranky, but the nice thing about law school is that one is never alone…

I walk into Real Estate Law:

Me: “Good Afternoon, Jill.”
Jill: “Hey, how are you?”
Me: “Eh. I think I’m over law school.”
Jill: “Me too. I really enjoyed 1L year but this year I just want to kill someone.”

Yikes.

The longer I am in law school, the less I see myself practicing, and the more I suspect that I am wasting my time.

…so I started researching English doctorate programs.

I opted to go to law school instead of the English PhD route because senior year I was so disgusted by some of my professors who read random theories into texts that couldn’t support them. It was a type of academic “scholarship” that was essentially creative writing masked as literary criticism.¹Shakespeare, Elvis, and McDonald’s in the African diaspora…

I rather create than criticize, but the MFA-professors at my undergrad always seemed to have a badge of inferiority because of their lack of doctorate degrees.² The question was always, “How well was your book received? Did it sell? When is your next book coming out?”

I am going to try and get into a literary theory class next semester and pick my professor’s brain about career options, and to see if a PhD is worth it.

If all else fails, I’ll be spend the first few years after law school as an underpaid attorney or an overeducated barista. Venti or Grande? Would you like a pastry or my legal opinion with that?

¹ …by people too uncreative to write an original work. This was also rampant in Art History classes, where there is a razor thin line between “advanced research” and “bullshit.”
² It seemed absolutely ridiculous that the people who were creating work were somehow less prestigious than those who did nothing but criticize it. But that was just my perception…